


Beautiful & Cruel

by vikaliya



Category: Gymnastics RPF
Genre: F/F, Gymnastics, Mustamova, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-23
Updated: 2012-09-23
Packaged: 2017-11-14 21:55:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/519908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vikaliya/pseuds/vikaliya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Viktoria is late for a study session and ends up sitting on Aliya's left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beautiful & Cruel

As usual, the seat to Aliya’s left is the last to remain empty before the study hall session officially begins. She’s gotten used to it, probably, even taken advantage of it a few times to place her excess study material where she has the extra desk space. Still, it’s always been the awkward place in Vika’s field of vision, a break in an otherwise perfectly filled room. It’s a reminder of less hopeful days, when the seat on Aliya’s right would also be empty.

For the first time in quite a while, Viktoria Komova is running late. Just the thought of Aliya is enough to make her sorry, even if sweet Yulia Inshina is sitting on Aliya’s right. As the clock marks the start of the hour, Aliya will surely be wondering whether something is wrong. She hasn’t seen Vika all morning, and Vika doesn’t like to leave her with her thoughts for too long. The reading assignment is posted on the board just as Vika rushes in with a quick, breathless apology to their instructor. Naturally, she takes the seat to Aliya’s left, giving her a broad smile before setting down her books and highlighters. The look that they share is brief, but hopefully Aliya takes it as a sign that all is well. Vika really did oversleep this time.

The usual hum of quiet does not come even when they both open their books and start to read. Page 88. There is a bridge of rustles and crisp shivers getting there, every time Vika’s arm comes close to brushing Aliya’s dim shadow on the shiny polished wood. Pale and soft, it curves on the surface of the desk they share. Even school cannot take them out of the world where they are one and two, gold and silver in the fragile hopes of their countrymen. Even the difficult letters on the page cannot take them away. They just capture this tumbling world in their narrow throats and swallow it, in fact.

_My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean…_

The excerpt is from an author called Cisneros, her prose too flat to fit well on Vika’s tongue until she bends her mouth with it. She cannot help but wonder if the author had meant it to be this way- a faceless story and its faceless girl needing an odd, mangled voice from the other side of the world to fill its empty, bold lines. This particular passage feels too much like a coincidence with reality to be comfortable to read.

_…I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain._

Vika’s heart does not protest when the back of her right hand brushes the back of Aliya’s left. Without pause, they both pick up their pens to whisper in the margins. In deceptively simple words, they are joined together for these impossible seconds, falling together down between the knock-kneed font before they understand what it marks. She wonders what this must be like for Aliya, for here Vika sees a bit of herself written in the cadence of someone an ocean and a tear’s breadth away. Two halves of a whole, this is Aliya’s too. 

_In the movies there is always one with red red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all away._

Vika can see only glimpses of the other side as the words flip across pauses, but she can see the shallow mourning in Aliya’s eyes gazing up at her from where she sits. Right on left, her hand slowly and surely wraps around Aliya’s in the small nook left where Vika’s straight frame does not fill the chair. Between them, there is nothing that will give away to fantasy. Vika is the one with hair the color of dust, but already she feels like she’s breaking out of her struggling bones. It’s an ugly fight for anyone, but Aliya shows what really emerges beyond the moving, flickering light. No matter how little of the past there is beyond her silence and her stubbornness, Aliya remembers. She will be what Vika opens into and cannot close from, her big sky in the dark. 

_Her power is her own. She will not give it away._

Here they are, staring at each other and missing something of their own in the other person while embracing the foreignness that holds those fragments intact.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Fate is funny sometimes, because this was supposed to be light and fluffy. Feel free to ask questions.
> 
> The quote is from The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, page 88. My title is from the title of the chapter of the book they are reading. I picked this book because Sandra Cisneros’s language seems like it would be more merciful than say, Jane Austen’s, for a non-native speaker. Plus, two foreign students whom I’ve met said that they read The Great Gatsby in high school. That’s a more difficult book, so I thought it would be realistic for Round Lake to at least take a stab at reading Cisneros.


End file.
